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Ask HN: What are your favorite terminal programs?

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91–100 of 203 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite terminal programs?

#91
I basically live in vim and tmux when I'm doing development work. Tmux IMO basically turns a terminal from a handy utility to a fully productive workspace.

I switched to ripgrep for my grepping needs, I find it fast and the syntax and output coloring handy.

Just found fastmod recently, https://github.com/facebookincubator/fastmod. Very handy for doing bulk substitutions of strings in project directories - it can prompt with a diff for every change and do full regexes, so you can try out tricky things and make sure it isn't doing anything crazy before you let it make 500 changes throughout your repo.

Also a fan of gitsh, https://github.com/thoughtbot/gitsh. Helps out with using Git on the command line just the right amount IMO - just avoiding the git prefix, tab completion, and a little syntax highlighting, instead of trying to redo the whole interface.

I don't use it that much, but jq, https://stedolan.github.io/jq/ is really handy for slicing and dicing json data without diving into the complexity of writing actual programs.

And on OS X, homebrew is indispensable for actually managing all of your CLI programs.

I also have found this Google Drive cli handy, https://github.com/odeke-em/drive. If you want to sync some but not all of your Google Drive files, and only push and pull on command instead of continuously, it's great.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite terminal programs?

#92
post #77

Emacs. Just ensure you're running a 256-bit color terminal emulator, and for most uses it doesn't even differ that much from the GUI version. Recently I've been doing a lot of work by SSH-ing to my desktop machine from a small netbook and using the terminal Emacs client. If you run Emacs in server mode, the transition is so smooth that at this point, I don't bother getting out of bed if I need to work on something la…

If you don't have a reason to use Emacs from the terminal emulator, use the GUI. And for SSH, it's very hard to reject Tramp. One must is to make it less verbose though: (setq tramp-verbose 1). Then it becomes faster (at least in my perception) and way less noisy.

Maybe I didn't word myself clearly enough - my reason for using Emacs from the terminal emulator is working from a small, portable machine on the go, and pick up stuff where I left it. It so happens that my travel machine is a Windows tablet/netbook, and Emacs has some performance quirks there. SSH-ing to a beefy desktop machine (that also runs an instance of the product I'm working on) saves me from fiddling with Tramp, and lets me almost seamlessly switch between travel mode and working on the desktop.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite terminal programs?

#95
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the tip. I briefly read through the docs and it's not clear what this offers above and beyond what tmux does?

The benefit of tmuxp is pretty clear from its README[1]. It gives this example: session_name: 4-pane-split windows: - window_name: dev window layout: tiled shell_command_before: - cd ~/ # run as a first command in all panes panes: - shell_command: # pane no. 1 - cd /var/log # run multiple commands in this pane - ls -al | grep \.log - echo second pane # pane no. 2 - echo third pane # pane no. 3 - echo forth pane # pan…

That looks handy, i can see a, 'setup my testing and development environment' with just a quick cp-and-edit of config file.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite terminal programs?

#96
It is no longer updated, but I recommend https://inconsolation.wordpress.com/ as a very good read. From the about page:

>This blog is intended as a quick look at terminal-based applications available in Linux, and in some similar operating systems. Not only are these ideal for modern, low-power and space-saving computers, but they go a long way toward invigorating out-of-date hardware.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite terminal programs?

#97
post #74

Linux has hundreds of them, in the various bin directories. Many are interesting. This shell snippet lists all the directories in $PATH, using less, so you can page through them: for dir in `echo $PATH | sed 's/:/ /g'` do echo Listing dir: $dir ls -l $dir | nl done | less I came across the watch command recently, which seems useful, and wrote something like it in Python: A Python version of the Linux watch command: h…

> Also, for saving (and then viewing) man pages (about commands or other topics), without the formatting characters (such as ^H), on some Linux distros, I find this useful:

^H is one of the two backspace characters (the other being ^?) depending on which VT standard you're configured to use. So you shouldn't really need a dedicate script to do that as it's just a problem between your pseudo-TTY (Linux console) and your terminal emulator (PuTTY / iTerm / xterm / etc).

Thankfully both are easily configurable. However without knowing which terminal emulator you're using I couldn't walk you throw configuring that. In terms of the TTY; you can change the backspace character via the `stty` command:

    stty erase [hit backspace on your keyboard]
Another thought is it might be a case that the TTY is largely configured correctly already but you're overwriting your environmental variables with non-standard values (eg the $TERM var with a value that differs from the actual terminal you're using) which is causing the pager (`less` / `more` etc. `man` will use this for the paging) to break the standard your terminal is expecting. But either way, this is definitely a configuration problem rather than something that should be fixed with additional parsing scripts.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite terminal programs?

#100
post #36

Written in Rust: - fd: A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to 'find' https://github.com/sharkdp/fd - ripgrep: ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep - exa: Replacement for 'ls' written in Rust https://github.com/ogham/exa - bat: A 'cat' replacement. I recommend following the customizations. https://github.com/sharkdp/bat Written in Python: - asciine…

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